Garrett Langley of Flock Safety on building technology to solve crime

12:40John:it's really hard for one agency to wrap their hands around that whole thing no at that point

12:45Garrett Langley:you've got like six different local cities, two different, sorry, three different state agencies and the U.S. Marshals all collaborating inside a flock.

12:53John:And like that's how it should work.

12:56Garrett Langley:Because in Ireland, that is actually the only option because you're the same police department. It's a very unique problem that America has created.

13:03John:Law enforcement coordination.

13:05Garrett Langley:Yeah. Like it should be, it shouldn't be controversial.

13:08John:Yes.

13:08Garrett Langley:But it's actually a very controversial topic. What's controversial about another way of this controversy? um this is it's an interesting question of like you um your trust in government probably follows some type of uh you know logarithmic expectation or linear expectation of like the farther you are removed from those people the least trust you have and so most people's trust in the federal government is very low state a little bit lower local full trust yeah and so there's this interesting dynamic where, let's talk about like a most recent case. My guess is that most people don't have a lot of trust for certain federal agencies.

13:50Garrett Langley:But when stuff goes really bad, like the Guthrie kidnapping, it's the federal government that runs the investigation. Like they are the only ones with the actual resources to work these cases. It's the FBI that's running that investigation, the brown shooter, the FBI, the Mar-a-Lago assassination attempt, the Secret Service. It goes down, but people have this big distrust. And so we actually see it in places like California There is state legislation that law enforcement is not allowed to collaborate with the federal authorities.

14:18John:Because of all the other stuff.

14:18Garrett Langley:On certain topics, because it's all of the, it's just different politics. And so we kind of have to sit in the middle. And when it's clearly legislated, like in California, it's actually, it's fine. That's the law that's actually very simple. It's in other states where it's opinion. And that's like, oh, that's really messy because we should just write laws. I mean, you operate in a regulated space. regulation when done properly just defines the rules of engagement sometimes it's better or worse but like at least everyone knows these are the rules yes yes um as i think about where fluck grew

14:53John:up and the um uh helping with flagging stolen vehicles and kind of a very vehicle oriented product how does that work at a technical level like you guys that there was a stolen database for stolen cars already, but that's an example of prior cross-law. Like, who maintains that database? How does it work?

15:16Garrett Langley:Yeah, so it's a good question. So you think about a couple of fun engineering problems that Flock had to solve. The first is, how do you do what's described? Read a license plate, track a car on solar power with a 5G backhaul.

15:31John:Which is the camera that you have installed like a traffic light. Yeah, exactly.

15:35Garrett Langley:But you very rarely have fiber or power where you want to put a camera.

15:38John:So you want a self-sufficient box that you can throw up at an intersection.

15:43Garrett Langley:Yeah. And be able to track a car going 100 miles an hour and do some level of computer vision on top of it. And that was a pretty fun problem because if you put, let's say you wanted to put a GPU in it, you can't run on solar power then. And so then it's like, all right, well, then what do you do on the edge? What do you do on the computer?

15:59John:And you can't buy any GPUs these days.

16:01Garrett Langley:Yeah, that would have been a huge disaster for us. But so the FBI maintains a list called the NCIC, which is about quarter to half a million known vehicles with other warrants. Could be the Amber Alert System, the Silver Alert System. We saw, sadly, a ton of silver alerts, too. I think we did just over 1 ,000 Amber and Silver Alerts last year that we helped clear. It's like missing adults, missing seniors and missing kids, which is pretty sad stuff. And so we have a direct integration with the FBI for that. And then at a local level, let's say like the Bay Area, there is a Bay Area hot list that we maintain with those agencies.

16:45John:Oh, wait. So I assume that there was a single integrated, when a car is called in and stolen. I assume that went somewhere integrated.

16:53Garrett Langley:So this is kind of scary. So let's say your car is stolen and you're in South San Francisco. They will immediately put it in the Bay Area Flock hot list immediately. It will take 24 hours to make it to the FBI hot list. And that's a CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across the US.

17:15John:As much the economy runs. We're very used to that model. You should be used to that at some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

17:19Garrett Langley:So the real time happens on Flock and then there's about a day lag to make it nationwide.

17:23John:Okay, so local entities have some kind of local lists, and those propagate to a national database, which is an FBI database. And what you guys are doing is making that real-time, which obviously, if a crime is unfolding in real-time, is a big deal. Exactly.

17:37Garrett Langley:Yeah. It's not good to wait a day.

17:40John:Yes. You can drive really far in 24 hours. It turns out, yes. And then you had some great stuff before about just a fraction of, like, stolen cars are bad news, like the fraction of crimes that involve stolen cars.

17:52Garrett Langley:There's an interesting phenomenon where no one really steals a car for fun. There's not much you can actually do. Is that true, like all the sideshows and stuff? Isn't there a little bit of stealing cars for fun? Well, the sideshows are definitely, they look fun. Never participated in it. Neither have I, but I just want to make sure here. It's my official statement of the matter. Dirt bikes, haven't ridden a dirt bike in a sideshow, but have watched plenty of videos online. That's fun. You're typically not stealing a car. You're typically driving your own car in those. You typically, while there are some people, I guess, who would steal a car and just drive it for fun, the main use case is when my car was stolen.

18:26Garrett Langley:My car was stolen, and then they used it to go rob three CVSs, did a bunch of drugs in the car, and then ditched it.

18:34John:And that's like a normal, you steal a car to go do something bad.

18:37Garrett Langley:Yeah, or you steal a car to go shoot someone, because you don't want to shoot someone in your own car if you're thinking ahead, you want to do it in a stolen car.

18:44John:We've all watched Pulp Fiction.

18:45Garrett Langley:Yeah, this is how you do this, right? And so we do a bunch of other interesting things. Like we have this feature called cold plating, where if we detect that the vehicle from an AI perspective, the make and model doesn't match the DMV record, that clearly the person's driving with a stolen license plate. That's another thing you can do. It's easier than stealing the cars. You steal someone's tag. So then you got to go down to like, we got to steal the same license plate from the same type of car. But then like if we detect an anomaly that the same car is in two places at once, we'll flag that.

19:14Garrett Langley:It's like, that's kind of weird. That's like a glitch in the matrix. So we have all these, and we would call them more like anomaly detections, where it's like, this isn't illegal yet, but it sure is kind of weird.

19:25John:Yes. And it provides enough reason to pull someone over.

19:31Garrett Langley:Yes. And depending on the size of the city, it's enough to dispatch an officer. I think if you're a major city like San Francisco, you have enough going on. But if you're, you know, a foster city, you're a smaller town where thankfully you don't have violent criminals running around every day. You're like, oh, that's weird. We have two cars at the same license plate in different parts of the city. We should go see what's going on.

19:50John:It strikes me that a way you can think about what Flock is doing is not changing any of the norms around privacy, but really expanding law enforcement's bandwidth to go deal with stuff. And so I don't think anyone really has an expectation of, you know, a right to privacy of the car they are driving just being observed from a distance or their license plate being readable when out on a public road. But if a car is called in and stolen rather than officers manually, you know, looking for that car and that license plate, instead you can just kind of much more quickly get it. and yet this kind of stuff ends up super controversial from a i don't say super controversial but it ends up controversial from a privacy point of view and so i don't know is is that take too generous it's a steelman of the other side why is it there is i mean i think

20:51Garrett Langley:you're right on the controversy i would articulate it as like if you're building a business that impacts millions of people's lives it's going to be controversy of some degree like i'm sure people i'm sure there's someone who hates stripe i don't know why they would but i'm sure that person exists Just like there's someone who hates Walmart. It's like they're trying to sell cheap groceries. Why do you hate? It's like people hate Airbnb. People hate every company. Maybe they hate us more. I don't know. I think there's a few things that make it for the Steelman argument. One is you can see it. So I bet you if we pulled up your iPhone and we looked at the number of apps that you've given full-time local location services, it would shock both of us.

21:33Garrett Langley:And then if we looked at the number of data brokers who then leverage that data to sell you ads, we'd be really shocked. And I think if we rewinded 30 years ago and said, imagine these private companies tracked your location in real time and sold that to advertisers, we'd be like, that is unacceptable. But because we can't see it, we kind of let it go. We have this perception of anonymity or being anonymous.

21:56John:Anonymity.

21:56Garrett Langley:Anonymity, thank you. Yet, like, you're an engineer. how many data points do you need to triangulate where someone is? How about where they sleep and where they work? And I know exactly who you are. And so there is that one piece, which is because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion, what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world. I go from work to home and to kids' birthday parties on the weekends. That's my life. So there's that piece. The second piece is like, there is a appropriate debate of what level of privacy erosion are we willing to take for an increase in safety?

22:42Garrett Langley:Now, you and I both choose to live in cities that have governments. So we've already chosen to remove some of our privacy. We drive on public roads. We're constitutionally, we have no explanation of privacy, but we're using the government's roads with the government's license plate. Like we have a driver's license in our pocket. Driver's licenses are a modern thing. that hasn't been around for 200 years. It's a newer concept driver's license. So we've accepted all of those. The articulation that I would have is like, I want my kids to be safe. And like, as long as there's accountability of like how the information is used, which we do, every single action in our system, the audit is stored in perpetuity and it's publicly available.

23:17Garrett Langley:And there, for us, like we really believe in this concept of a certain data retention, which kind of limits the level of abuse. It doesn't eliminate abuse. There's still going to be abuse, but it limits that, hey, if it's seven days, 14 days, 30 days of data,

23:30John:it's just not that interesting. Yeah.

23:32Garrett Langley:Relative to what you see with data brokers online where they have your entire internet history stored forever.

23:38John:You're interested in fresh data. That's what's useful.

23:42Garrett Langley:Yeah, there's a really fast drop-off of where have you been in the last couple of days versus like, where were you a year ago? It's very irrelevant in a criminal investigation. Yes, yes. Or it's protected behind a warrant, which is fine.

23:54John:Right. You talked about cell phone locations and your cell phone having your GPS location. And I'm reminded of the phenomenon where it feels like the balance of power and the offense-defense mix within crime fighting tends to change over the years as new technologies are invented. And criminals get wise to fingerprinting exists and things like that. it feels like cell phone locations have had a huge impact on crime fighting. Not even GPS location, but just the coarse cell tower data. And in particular in murder cases, it's had a huge impact. I'm curious just what are the other major trends going on from a technology point of view in how crime gets fought?

24:38Garrett Langley:Yeah, that's CDRs would be the nomenclature in the law. What's CDR?

24:44John:Cell phone data dump or CDR cell data. Something like that, yeah.

24:47Garrett Langley:But it's your point. It's the broader, like, you hit these three towers, therefore you're in this general vicinity. That is, like, one of the best kept secrets for law enforcement of, like, how to solve crime. Which, you know, people dumbly commit crime with their cell phone in their pocket every time. It's very, I think I've heard of one case in the last 12 months where someone was smart enough to commit a homicide and left their cell phone at home by design. It was very intentional. They were very organized. A couple other ones. How did they get caught? uh it's actually a flock obviously um so they were smart enough to leave their cell phone yeah they were dumb enough so they drove from la up to san francisco um general area um they had a bunch of flock cameras along the way um they didn't pick up their cell phone until they went back to lax and we have cameras all around lax um and like they finally made that one mistake they had it was a completely cold case until they got a hit on the car pulling into lax then got the cell phone could do the whole thing.

25:48Garrett Langley:This is a good case.

25:49John:And I guess the thing you can do is you can know that a cell phone's in a car because you can cross-reference. We don't touch that,

25:53Garrett Langley:but the law enforcement can.

25:54John:Sorry, law enforcement can cross-reference cell phone location would flock.

25:58Garrett Langley:So they knew that the vehicle was in a certain parking lot. They can then use, they have to have a warrant at this point. Sure. They have a warrant to pull what cell phones were in that area and then start to build the case. But to your question, I'd say the most, the current phenomena that is causing a ton of problems domestically is drones. And this is an example where it's asymmetric. warfare that law enforcement is being put up against where criminals have no rules. How are criminals using drones? So here's a good example. In one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area, South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods.

26:37Garrett Langley:They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in. They don't want a confrontation. They just want to do so much stuff. People are using drones to case houses? To scope out. Yep. Wow. And this is where the downside is. Law enforcement has just recently in the last year been allowed to fly beyond visual line of sight. These guys have been operating for years. They jerry-rig, you know, an LTE modem to a cheap drone. They can fly it anywhere, however they want. And then legally, even to today, law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down.

27:09Garrett Langley:It's FAA airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace. Sure, yeah, yeah. And so they just sit there. And so that's a problem in neighborhoods. It's also a problem in prisons. It's probably the number one problem we have in our prison system today. Well, a lot of problems in prisons. But one of the leading problems for enforcement officers is you've got these pretty incredible, actually, from an engineering perspective, drones that are carrying 10, 20, 30-pound payloads, flying them over the prison walls. And, like, they'll literally dangle it down to, like, the prison cell, and the person will reach out and grab it.

27:39John:Cell phones, drugs, guns. We have Keller from Zipline here. It's Zipline for criminals.

27:44Garrett Langley:And these guys have built a comparable product. And I was with a sheriff that I know really well, and he was like, if I shoot that down with a shotgun, I'm technically breaking the law. I'm breaking federal law if I shoot this down with a shotgun. And so you're seeing states now pass, like Louisiana has a state bill, Georgia's working on a state bill that says, sorry, FAA, we're going to do what we want. And that creates a problem, because most law enforcement officers just want to follow the law. Yeah, and presumably that won't stand up from a federal preemption

28:13John:point of view. No, and like the other challenge

28:16Garrett Langley:is like, I think you and I would say like, who's going to enforce this? The FAA is not an enforcement body, but these people want to follow the law and the law says clearly like, you can't shoot a drone down. Yes. You can detect it. You can't mitigate. Ah, I have no idea. It's a totally crazy law.

28:31John:Yeah.

28:32Garrett Langley:What else has made, what else has gotten worse from an offense perspective? I mean, this is one that's like a, you know, I don't know if I have strong feelings on this topic, but this concept that we appropriately hold local law enforcement to a very high standard of accountability and audibility and i think that's very good yes the downside is like we don't with criminals and so as a citizen you don't be the victim of a crime you get really frustrated that they're not working hard enough and it's very really that it's that they don't have the tools they don't have the data or they're not legally allowed to get to the data and the warrant system is a very, very good thing.

29:11Garrett Langley:It's like a very effective tool. But like there's a debate of like, should law enforcement have more ability to solve crime faster? And the example of the framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology. And I'll give you an example. Facial recognition, hot topic. There are thousands of cities in America that have banned law enforcement from using facial recognition. John, facial recognition is not bad. That's the technology. It's not good either. It's just technology. I think a way more effective measure would be to say, hey, look, facial rec has its pros and cons.

29:51Garrett Langley:You can't use it for shoplifting, but for homicides, crimes against children. Like, go to your list of things that, like, we as a society care deeply about. Law enforcement should do everything in their power to solve those cases. And then, yeah, the, like, petty stuff, we should say, look, like, we gotta make progress there, but you stole a pack of Skittles. We probably shouldn't deploy a drone to find you. If you kill someone, I think we should work really, really hard as a society to hold you accountable. But there's no nuance.

30:20John:That nuance does not come through.

30:21Garrett Langley:No, they're just like, facial rec is bad. And we don't do facial recognition for that reason because it's too controversial, but it's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day.

30:31John:Yes, yes. And obviously another interesting thing that's happening amongst these trends is the prevalence of body cams, which I think maybe was in some corners promoted by law enforcement skeptics, but I think now has... It's backfired? I wouldn't say backfired, but just like it's actually in a lot of cases been somewhat exonerative, right?

30:54Garrett Langley:Yeah, no, I think in many cases, police were really hesitant to get body cameras. Just like, I mean, imagine if you wore a body camera all day at work, you'd be like,

31:05John:ah, I'm not sure if I love that idea.

31:06Garrett Langley:It's kind of a little bit invasive, but they did. And I would say in the majority of cases that I see where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse. Where a law enforcement officer was just trying to do their job. And on the other side, there was other mental health issue. There was something gone wrong and it actually exonerates the officer, which is kind of interesting. And I think the same thing is true, what at least we're seeing on the camera side, on the streets is, you know, historical policing, sadly, is quite prejudiced, right? We all have our biases, whether it's conscious or unconscious.

31:40Garrett Langley:So you have bad data in, you get bad data out. And so the traditional way of policing is like you go to dangerous neighborhoods, look for suspicious people and arrest them. So it's like you're perpetuating a trend against a certain community. And when you look at like Oakland as a good example, who's quite a big supporter of Flock, they're like, we need a more objective way to police. Let's just focus on stolen cars. We don't care who's inside. We will find out eventually that car was stolen. And then you don't wind up policing where crime has happened historically. You wind up policing where crime is happening right now in real time.

32:15And that is a fairly fundamental shift

32:18Garrett Langley:in how policing works. And it, for many cities we work with, changes the perception of this, the kind of community with law enforcement. Because they're no longer felt like they're being targeted. It feels like it's, wherever crime happens, we're going to go chase it. And if there's not been crime in the last couple of days, then we're good. Yep, yep. Is crime up or down in the US? It is down. I think it'll continue to go down. COVID was like really bad. So it surged during COVID? Crazy surge. Okay. People lost their minds. I think we tested society of like what happens if you keep people inside for too long.

32:56Garrett Langley:And people got really violent.

32:58John:Yeah, so do you have an explanation? Is it that like it was a mental health issue or was it kind of a crime of opportunity that, you know, things were less well guarded and, you know, there's more opportunities for crime? But you think it was just people went a bit batty being locked up? I think so. And resorts to crime.

33:13Garrett Langley:But I mean, I'm obviously not a, you know, clinical psychologist, but it's like you look at the data and there's no other way to articulate why. you know, homicides three to four X'd and then plummeted back down, let's call it somewhat reasonable levels. Like there's a very few number of cities that are left at COVID levels. Most cities had this massive spike. Yes. And like the way to,

33:39Garrett Langley:if you look at the people who were committing that violence, they tended to be 16 to 22 male and very online. Very online? Yeah.

33:50John:And so this is really sad. That's right. How do you measure very online?

33:54Garrett Langley:Let me give you an example. I was in a town, a major city, not too long ago, and I was asking the chief to tell me kind of what's going on. This is a couple years ago, right, during COVID. And she was like, Garrett, these kids are just killing each other. I was like, what? She's like, yeah, they're literally getting in their car and just shooting each other. I'm like, why? I'm like, oh, because this guy posted a picture

34:17John:of him with that guy's girl on Instagram.

34:20Garrett Langley:And I think in a normal situation, you might have called that person and been like, hey, bro, that's my girl. And in other cases, they're getting in a car and shooting someone. And that's not normal. That's not normal behavior. And it wasn't normal before COVID. And it happened a lot during COVID. And then it's largely gone away. But it was a very specific social phenomena where the race to violence was so dramatic. It was so scary. And I don't think society has necessarily gone fully back to normal. But if you look at the data, it's hard to articulate that. That's the most obvious explanation to me.

34:53John:And I guess there are other empirical measures like air rage incidents, road rage incidents. All of that kind of stuff went up during COVID.

34:59Garrett Langley:Everything went up. Everything. People just literally lost their minds. I think we need to be outside.

35:05John:But okay, so how are we doing now on crime? You say it's down. Is that across all categories? Because you read Twitter and it's like everything's locked up at CVS. San Francisco is full of... There's all these memes. which are maybe do some debunking and confirming of all the means so so uh every city is a little

35:22Garrett Langley:bit different um major cities still have major crime problems um i would argue you know i live in atlanta and the mayor you know he's made it very clear anything greater than zero homicides is a tragedy tragedy and therefore we're on the race to zero still like as an unacceptable level and we're down historic lows over the last decade but it's still pretty hard to wake up and go you only 52 people died in Atlanta last year. You can't pat yourself on the back for that. I think where we're focused on is more so clearance rates. And that's actually getting better, but only better in certain cities.

36:00Garrett Langley:Now, we track it across Flock, not to overly promote, like it tends to be that if you have a Flock product, your city has a much higher clearance rate. You look at San Francisco as a great example. The new chief, the prior chief, Mayor Lurie, like they are making crime a focus. And the focus is on solving crime. And when they solve it, as I'm sure you follow on the news, they talk about it.

36:23John:Yeah.

36:23Garrett Langley:And they should, because like it's really cool. They're working very hard. And what you'll see is back to the online point I made, all these people are online. And so when San Francisco PD is dominating X, It has a deterrent effect. Oh gosh, yeah. You don't want to get caught.

36:38John:Yeah.

36:38Garrett Langley:And that's like the unintuitive or the counterintuitive point on crime is that most people would intuitively we say oh if the punishment's really really bad people will do less of it but you were 16, 18 at one point you operate on a Boolean mindset I will get away with this therefore I will do it I'm going to sneak out of my house because I'm not going to get caught you don't care if the punishment is being grounded for a week or a month you're going to get away with it you're 17 it's just whether

37:02John:I get caught or not yeah yeah

37:03Garrett Langley:yeah and so I'm not looking as criminals for someone online so if you flip oh it's like it's a subculture you got to get there but I mean you'll see

37:11John:sorry is this like Reddit, Twitter they're everywhere

37:14Garrett Langley:Pinterest. Probably less Pinterest, but I mean, TikTok's really big.

37:18John:Yeah.

37:18Garrett Langley:Instagram's really big. Snapchat's really big. And like it is, it's how they recruit though, right? Because like the whole, the whole recruitment effort is, you know, I'm going to show a lifestyle online that seems dream worthy. Yeah. To recruit these people. And then they're in and they're going to perpetuate that. And the data actually shows it's actually not a very good job. You actually don't make very much money being a criminal. It's like the medium income for your average criminal is like, it's very, very low.

37:43John:Yeah.

37:43Garrett Langley:But they promote a lifestyle of wealth. So if you look at those cities, like, so you take San Francisco, crime's coming down, clearance rates are going up. And I would say, like, as soon as we can get somewhere like San Francisco to 100 % clearance rate, which we have in other cities, crime goes down. 100 % clearance rate is like 100 % solved? Yes. And it's doable. We have it in major cities. Like which? Like Cobb County would be one, which is like the second largest county.

38:10John:Cobb County has 100 % cleared to happen. Yep.

38:11Garrett Langley:If you commit violence in Cobb County, you will get arrested. And that's a cross-spot sample size? That's the second largest county in Georgia. So let's call it a couple million people. Almost a million people. So a decent number of violent crimes. Oh, yeah.

38:24John:Yeah, yeah.

38:25Garrett Langley:But it's going down every year. Sure. So you look at places like that. Because you will get caught. Yeah, it's like we have this new concept that we've developed called Safe City. And we'll go into a town and say, look, this is the platform you need to solve all the crime in your city. It's your choice. It tends to be like about 20 bucks a citizen a year. It's like a sheer choice. And like what's fun to watch is we find these mayors with really strong backbones. And they're like, I want to be a safe city. There's just like this awesome town, Greenville, Mississippi. You've probably never heard of it.

38:56Garrett Langley:26 ,000 people. They have our drones. They have our cameras. They have our AI. They have everything we do. And they are lighting it up. And like kudos to the mayor-in-chief. Like every crime they solve, they're on the 5 o 'clock news.

39:09John:So these are highly effective cities. What happens to the criminals? Does it shift it to other localities? And it's like disease eradication. You ultimately need to do enough to blanket it, to snuff it out. Because if just one municipality does it, it'll shift to a local municipality. Does it actually, within that municipality, people just go to something non-criminal? I'm curious, what are the effects of one municipality getting really good?

39:38Garrett Langley:There's two phases. The first phase, you're spot on. Like people that just change cities. It's like when San Francisco started adopting Flock, Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt Flock. Yes. And now like a couple of false starts. Now that that's fully going, they will have the same. But like first is the shift. Yes. And then you're right. Like this is, people don't, the majority of criminals, let's call it 99 % of criminals are not evil people. They're not. Like evil is a random act of violence. And that is exceptionally rare.

40:09John:It's very rare. It's opportunism.

40:11Garrett Langley:It's all opportunism. And like you and I were fortunate enough to be born in a family, in a social construct that we could go build great companies. But not everyone had that chance. And some people get pushed in the wrong direction. And that's what we have to stop. It's like as a business, we don't, while we're proud of the impact, you know, making a million arrests, it's actually quite disheartening. because that means like a million people will not have to go through the criminal justice system, which doesn't work that well. There's a million victims. Like it's bad in every single way. It's also crazy expensive as a society to jail that many people.

40:43Garrett Langley:It's like, it's a double negative bottom line where it's costly and prohibitive that they'll probably never reenter society. So we're much more focused on the preventative mechanisms of like, how do you convince someone this is not a good lifestyle? This is not a long-term plan. And eventually what you will see is like they will go get jobs. Like these are functional members of society. that can be functional members, we should push them in that direction. What kind of crime is on the increase? So I'll tell you one that's pretty fascinating. So if you look in the enterprise community, organized resale crime in stores was really hot during COVID and right after COVID.

41:18Garrett Langley:That's why you saw CVS lock their stuff up. You saw places like In-N-Out, Leaf Oakland. This was a huge problem. And it's still, for someone like Walmart, I think they reported just shy of a billion dollars of theft last year. So it was a lot of money. and like their peers aren't doing dramatically better. Now, Flock customers are doing really well.

41:39John:Yeah, Walmart's on neophytes at this stuff. Yeah, but they'll get there.

41:42Garrett Langley:Yeah, we'll get there with Walmart. But like you look at some of our partners like Lowe's, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not really a problem anymore. But where the criminals have moved is to the distribution facilities. It's safer and bigger loads. And so probably the most sophisticated one that I've heard of is it's an Eastern European group. They went and bought a legal, like well-running freight broker. They now own this asset and they bid on all these, low bid on all these projects, show up with real paperwork, fill up a 20 foot with product, drive away, dissolve the company.

42:25Garrett Langley:$7 million in a single day.

42:28John:Like that's pretty good business. Yeah.

42:30Garrett Langley:that's very sophisticated though um that's harder to solve um that's very that's much harder to

42:36John:solve because every car phone like everything will be disposable used in that everything's

42:42Garrett Langley:going to leave the country as fast as possible and just show up on a street somewhere and then the other interesting challenge is um you you have to unpack this is like a little bit complicated who's liable. So as soon as the product goes into a store, that retailer is liable for the theft. Like it hits their bottom line. For a lot of these companies, they negotiated such that, you know, there is insurance coverage from a different broker that owns that asset until final delivery. And so it's not super clear, like who actually cares. And it's going to take - Or the insurer cares. Insurer cares eventually.

43:20Garrett Langley:Yeah. But when you talk about the scale of what's called, tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of product being moved, you're like, oh, we lost a couple hundred million. I see.

43:30John:Yeah, yeah.

43:30Garrett Langley:We'll be fine. We have insurance.

43:32John:Yeah, yeah.

43:32Garrett Langley:It will catch up eventually, but that's probably the most interesting type of crime we're tracking is the tacking on the distribution. So we have a lot of partners on the distribution side where we're now deploying our product to try to prevent this from becoming an epidemic.

43:46John:Yes.

43:47Garrett Langley:But it's much harder to solve. It's a real company. Yes, yes. I want to ask you more about this,

43:51John:but I'm going to get you another Guinness. This is a good segue into your corporate business because, again, people associate you with selling to municipalities, but obviously you sell a lot to corporates as well.

44:01Garrett Langley:Yeah. It's a big part of our business. Can you say how big? North of 100 million of AR.

44:09John:Oh, okay. So, like, it's real.

44:10Garrett Langley:Probably fastest growing segment. There's some wild stories. So, you know, we help businesses solve two problems. How do you keep your employees safe and how do you keep your assets or your stuff safe? So it's kind of funny because we have a Fortune 5 company that's a customer.

44:29John:And you probably don't want to talk about specifics, but we should just imagine big box stores that kind of Home Depot, Walmart, those.

44:34Garrett Langley:The thing is we have this Fortune 5 company that's a customer and they spend like$100 ,000 a year because they have like three locations in the country. That's it. They have like three really big campuses. So they're actually like, We don't proxy towards necessarily market cap or revenue. We proxy to physical locations. Like how many locations? So someone like a Dollar General is a way better prospect for us because Dollar General has 7 ,000 stores.

44:59John:Yeah. You want Subway.

45:01Garrett Langley:Yeah, you want Subway is a good example. So we tend to focus on retail, healthcare, and logistics. They tend to have big physical footprints, a lot of employees, and a lot of challenges.

45:14John:And is there a main challenge theft? like that's what they're worried about, that they want to prevent stolen cars coming to steal stuff?

45:23Garrett Langley:I'd say employees is, I'd say three years ago when we started the business unit, it was assets. It was like, oh my gosh, coming out of COVID, everyone's stealing everything. It is much more shifted now to keeping employees safe. So you think about some of these businesses, they might terminate half a million people a year, quarter of a million people a year. It takes one angry employee to come back. And so in our system, You can have it automated with the HRS that when an employee is terminated, they're added to a localized hot list. If that employee ever comes back on campus, it's not illegal.

45:55Garrett Langley:But notify security is why people have security teams. Don't let them in the building. So it's about moving that layer of safety farther out. The other example is we do quite a bit of work in executive protection. So I'll give you a good example. I think a Fortune 2000 CEO. Our stuff's deployed at her house. We also deploy at corporate. It's not illegal, but it's quite weird if the same vehicle on the same day goes to both locations.

46:23John:That is not that person.

46:24Garrett Langley:Yeah, it's not that person or their EP team. And so, like, we're, I think keeping people safe is the number one thing. And the assets is, like, it's good, but worst case, you just raise prices, which is not good. But we had this crazy case with one of our healthcare partners where this group, pretty smart actually, would show up to the hospital dressed in a certain company's uniform and be like, oh, the robotic surgical arm needs to be repaired. Can you help me grab it? And some clinical surgeon's like, oh, yeah, let me show you where it is. No worries. No worries, John. Walk in there. This is a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment.

47:05Garrett Langley:and they literally walk out with it. This happened in - Some Thomas Crown affair kind of stuff. But it's like, I mean, you're a physician. You're not thinking like, oh, is John actually working at this company? Is the product, I think I used it yesterday. You're like, oh yeah, that sounds right. It's super expensive product. So this is an example to your conversation of like where the business gets interesting is we then connected that healthcare provider with federal authorities. So this is not a low, this isn't gonna be a local authority to solve this kind of crime. It's a federal crime at this point.

47:34Garrett Langley:was they were taking the product, exporting it, and selling it in a different country for kind of, you know, clinical work. So we think that one's pretty interesting. There's like, and that's an asset one where actually the healthcare system is like, this is like 20-something million dollars of products stolen. Like, that's a problem. Yeah.

47:52John:Is your business going international? Which countries is this best suited to? Like, is this a universally applicable product? Do those differences in, you know, law enforcement agency structure make it? I'm just curious. We're dabbling, but I think payments is probably a very global, everyone wants to process payments.

48:16Garrett Langley:Yes, but there's a lot of local nuance. Yeah. I think for us, maybe our ambitions aren't big enough, but when I look at the domestic opportunity, we should be able to get to 5, 10, 15 billion of revenue in America. And we're not there. Yes. And so it's the difference of, to your point of the nuance in payments, it's probably comparable to the nuance of working with local government. But then you overlay hardware. And that just gets maybe two steps too difficult for my stomach today. Got it. Today. Yeah. But there's, I mean, we get an inbound. I saw an email this morning from an Australian police department.

48:54Garrett Langley:It's like, we'd love to do a demo. And it's like.

48:57John:Why not just do, I mean, I agree with a lot of nuance. Is there some aspect of your tech? Like you've put a lot of work into the cameras, vehicle recognition, stuff like that. I know, again, from painful experience, that localization is never easy and never as easy as you think.

49:12Garrett Langley:Yeah. But maybe it's easy. Well, so here's the argument. So we pursued one really big deal last year in Mexico. We had support from one of our investors, like, we should go after Cigar and Great. And they had connections to the Mexican government. so we got all the way to the finish line and it was us versus Hickvision

49:34John:Hickvision is a

49:36Garrett Langley:Chinese camera manufacturer arguably a subsidiary of the CCP and we were almost 10 times the price and it came down to like well is the Department of Homeland Security going to subsidize for this for the Mexican government because we know their list price is way more than this It's very clear this is being subsidized for the Mexican government to make this purchase decision, of which case they will most likely be giving away real-time feeds to another government. And we didn't win that deal. And I think that if you look at, there's a great book on this topic, if you look at what China was able to do in Africa with their infrastructure deployments on connectivity, they own those countries.

50:23Garrett Langley:What's the book, Caddy Grassley? I'll find it for you.

50:25John:Okay. I'll find the book.

50:28Garrett Langley:But the book pretty much shows that one of the maybe smartest moves that China did was going to these developing countries and saying, we will give you 5G. Really low cost. We'll bond it for like 100 years. So we're not giving away for free. But guess what now? Chinese government has access to your pipes. And maybe that's not scary for some countries. For me, I'd be a little afraid. And that was our pitch to the Mexican government. is like, you don't look at just cost, look at the sovereignty of the data and who has access and look, we'll domicile this data in your country. We won't domicile it in America.

51:02Garrett Langley:And they were like, sorry, it's too expensive. And we've seen that. We've done a couple of other projects like that, not just picking on Mexico, but other countries where we're not competitive with China, not because our products aren't better, I think they're much better, but we're not being subsidized by the federal government.

51:15John:But presumably NATO countries, you know, Australia should be better. but I mean, no.

51:24Garrett Langley:I mean, I can, we should go walk around, you know, a strip mall and I could probably point out 80 % of the cameras are Chinese manufactured and your average would-be business owner is like, yeah, I got it for 15 bucks on Amazon. And I don't know if you know that story on kind of like the, you know, vacuum cleaners. Oh, sure, yeah.

51:44John:It's like, the robot vacuums, yeah.

51:46Garrett Langley:You should care about where your data is stored and who's storing it And that kind of stuff matters to me, but not everyone.

51:53John:That makes sense. As we've learned from Flock Safety, fighting crime is most effective with network data on your side. The same is true for payment fraud. Most businesses only see their own transactions, which makes it very hard to spot patterns and prevent future attacks. But Stripe Radar tackles fraud using the power of the Stripe network. Our machine learning models train on hundreds of billions of data points across the$2 trillion of payments we see on the Stripe network each year. When new fraud patterns emerge, our models can quickly learn and start blocking similar attacks immediately. So if you want to fight fraud, like Flock Safety fights crime, check out Stripe Radar.

52:34As I think about your competitive landscape in the US and companies that sell to law enforcement,

52:41John:I think about Axon, which people would associate with making the body cameras, but they make lots of other stuff. and then Motorola Solutions, which does kind of the radios and like the get up in the cars and things like that. Are you three the main three players? Are there others I should be thinking about? And how will this, like presumably you guys compete more over time?

53:02Garrett Langley:Yeah. So I remember in 2020, trying to raise our Series B, and every investor came to the same conclusion. Three strikes are out. Strike one, you're based in Atlanta. Now like post-COVID, that's become like less of a problem. But strike one, you're in Atlanta. Strike two, you're doing hardware. But that's really bad. Hardware is really expensive.

53:24John:Now it's the only business with terminal value.

53:26Garrett Langley:I would argue that AI is not going to replace cameras or dig holes. Yes, yes. I mean, a third of our employees dig holes for a living. That's just AI is a long ways away from, I think, replacing that. Sorry, what are they digging the holes for? Most of the time, you want a camera where you don't have any infrastructure. I see. It's like a free-sharing post or something. We dig the hole. We trench it. We pour concrete. Put our pole up. I mean, I might be...

53:48John:Okay, so it's on your own pole. I seem to just mount it on an existing pole.

53:51Garrett Langley:I think I should pull this data. I would not be surprised if I'm the largest general contractor in America. We pulled 77 permits a day last year. And if you've ever built a house, you know how difficult it is to permit something. Sure, yeah.

54:02John:77 permits a day.

54:05Garrett Langley:By crazy scale, AI is not going to replace that. It's like a very safe asset. But so yeah, so when we were trying to raise that Series B, the third strike was, second strike was hardware, where Third Strike was, and you're trying to sell to the government? The last company to go public was Axon. They went public in 2005, which would have been 15 years prior. And in the VC speak, it's like, well, if you can't get big enough to go public, you're not worth investing in. It's like, well, crap. So luckily, Gary Tan shared my beliefs of like, safety should be a public right. It shouldn't be a privilege.

54:37Garrett Langley:It should be a right if you live in America. So he did our Series B, which is, I think, to say, the only Series B he's ever done. That's awesome. And he was right. And I was right. So it's the three of us now. It's Motorola who's the biggest. They're about a$90 billion market cap, 120 years old, invented the radio, still are the, I think they have 80 % market share globally of landmass radio, just like crazy scale.

54:59John:It's funny how durable some of these businesses, Garmin and other, like you just start doing GPS, you start doing radio and you stay doing radio.

55:05Garrett Langley:Own it, you own it. And to like Motorola's credit, like they've driven a ton of innovation on the radio itself, similar to Garmin, which like you'd thought Garmin would have been crushed.

55:13John:And it's like - they've been so creative in creating verticals you know aviation and all this awesome products

55:18Garrett Langley:um and no one would debate whether motorola's radios work really well and when you need them which would be like a natural disaster yeah they work especially well yeah and that's like pretty compelling when your job is to respond to natural disasters yeah so you know motorola uh every single thing we do we compete with motorola um so that's fun they're big second one would be axon you know like I said public in 2005

55:43John:about a 40 billion dollar market cap where did they come out of like I understand where Motorola came out of

55:48Garrett Langley:yeah so Rick Smith the founder graduated Harvard it's like a fun fact he plays it off he's a very smart guy graduated Harvard found this taser company it wasn't called taser at the time okay so they started with tasers yeah found those kind of the IP the product and then tried to commercialize it and it's if you're you love a good founding story it's it's a good one where you know almost went out of business his like dad mortgaged the house he mortgaged the house went public because they couldn't finance it i think they went out at like a 50 million dollar like you know market cap this is like when people went public you know much earlier um and just has done a really good job of of growing the business

56:30John:in the public markets and taser is a brand it's like keenx they own they started as they started

56:35Garrett Langley:Started Taser and rebranded to Axon in 2012 or 2015.

56:40John:Yeah.

56:41Garrett Langley:And got into body cams via acquisition. So they bought a company that had just won the contract for the New York Police Department to do body cams. So bought that. They have a dash camera, and they'd recently launched a competitive product with me. So now we compete. Everything we do, we compete with Axon, too. It's fun.

56:59John:So it's just a Mexican standoff, ironically. Every single city.

57:02Garrett Langley:Every single city. And there was interesting, because your question was also in the future, there's this really interesting phenomenon happening now where because Flock's been somewhat successful, VCs have like poured in. And when I used to call a police department seven years ago.

57:19John:Now you have a bunch of competitors from below as well.

57:21Garrett Langley:No one would, no one would, you could literally just walk into a police department and be like, I want to meet the chief. They're like, that's great. Now chiefs are like, great, 17 different people calling me for the exact same price. Now they don't compete with us, thankfully. but like you think about take like trying to deploy AI to monitor body cam footage. There's seven different companies with VC backing doing that. There's not

57:43John:it's not a big enough market.

57:44Garrett Langley:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you know your annual report was great by the way. Y 'all are at what 1 % of GDP or something probably? Okay. I'm in 60 to 70 % of the cities that matter. Yes, yes. There's just not enough space for seven competitors. It won't the market's not big enough and we're not creating new cities. There's a new business that's created every single day.

58:03John:I think you tend to see structurally in these smaller, I mean, it's a large market in total, but where there's a finite universe of buyers, the distributional advantages are very powerful. I think that's what you're saying.

58:17Garrett Langley:Yeah, I think so. And so I think what we'll see is, I see a new VC-backed company every day. And I'm like, there's just, all these things are going to be a business, so there's just going to be consolidation. And so you see, I think Motorola has done 40 acquisitions in the last two years. Axon did five last year. We did one last year.

58:34John:I just think you're going to see a ton of consolidation.

58:37Garrett Langley:Because once someone builds a good product, you go, great. I already have a Salesforce. I have the customer base. We'll just pick you up.

58:43John:So I had no idea about the, you know, you're talking about where the tech goes. I had no idea about two things, actually, I learned here. One is that you're doing real-time analysis of 911 calls. And so is that, I mean, is that being fed to an LLM, basically? Are like 911 calls now scored by an LLM?

59:00Garrett Langley:So the way I think about it is we are trying to build an orchestration layer for a city's safety. The majority of police departments are understaffed. I think the worst I've heard recently, I was at a higher ed, so a college campus, a large college campus, you know, a football school. They're at 40 % of staffing.

59:22John:Could you imagine if like tomorrow you woke up and Stripe had 40 % staffed?

59:27Garrett Langley:Yeah, it'd be tough. You would like figure it out. But a lot of things that you would deem core today would just stop. Yes, yes. And so that's how most of our customers operate, which is not sustainable. Yes. And so we view our job as like being that force multiplier, or I like to think about this orchestration layer where every manual thing that's done by a human should be automated. Now, the difference in public safety versus maybe payments is like, I think you want humans at the start and finish still. It's like if I call 911, still kind of want a person to pick up. And those dispatchers are incredibly well trained.

59:59Garrett Langley:They're very well trained. They're very calm. Now, where I think it gets valuable is like, but let's say there's a mass event. AI is way better. Because if you have a surge of demand and you go from only one call a minute to 10 calls a minute, AI is better than a busy tone. And that makes sense. And then I think about, for us, we call it amplified intelligence. When that 911 call comes in, LLM is able to pick up the call, is able to determine what are the characteristics. Can I go sort of build an investigation? Can I go pull this up so that if you're the detective, whereas historically you walk in, you're like, all right, I'm going to go get the call transcript.

1:00:31Garrett Langley:I'm going to go look up my record system. I'm going to go do a bunch of analysis. It's the equivalent of having, you know, whether you use something like a Glean or another product that's like, you're going to do a lot of the hard work. So that as a sales rep, you show up and you're like, got it. And so we do that for investigators. So they show up to, they get delivered a case and a lot of the busy work has been done for them so they can use the human part of their job.

1:00:51John:I'm writing all the data that needs this.

1:00:53Garrett Langley:All the different data, like let's go do this. Like we solved, one of the cooler cases we've solved was armored, you know, like armored trucks, like Brinks, they move money around. It's one of the best, it's called like a jugging case. It's very popular in Texas where you like, you follow these armored trucks and you typically have like a shooter on a nearby building. And when the person walks out, the shooter shoots him. The other guy runs in, grabs all the money, and runs away. It's obviously sad, but it's a very, very profitable thing. So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so at all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's an armored truck.

1:01:33Garrett Langley:If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically. Now, it's not illegal. Yeah, yeah, sure. Right? But it is enough that if you're a city like Houston who has a jogging problem, You want to get a subscription to like, you let me know whenever you see someone doing that because I want to know. I want to get a step ahead. So there's always types of crimes that you can sort of say, okay, this is helping officers not do something new. It is just doing things that when you're at 50%, 40 % staffing, if you're at 100%, you'd have been doing this yourself. You'd be checking the cards, you'd be in flock, you'd be running searches, but you can't do that anymore.

1:02:05John:Yeah, what you're describing is again, having this data to be able to do anomaly detection just allows for a new kind of police work that otherwise just wouldn't have gotten done.

1:02:17Garrett Langley:No, it's like people's lives, you know?

1:02:21John:And then the other thing I hadn't realized you guys were doing is the drone assistance where, again, this sounds to me like, you know, obviously already it's the case that, you know, many police departments have a helicopter and then for very serious crimes, you know, they will task it. But that's expensive, very limited resource. And so I think what you're doing is allowing for some manner of air support to just be much more cost effective and available to more officers.

1:02:47Garrett Langley:That's right, yeah. I mean, I think it's another example where there's just a lot of tasks we ask law enforcement officers to conduct that a drone could do faster, more effectively, and cheaper. Yes. And so if it's, you know, calling out a hit and run, great, send the drone. I was working with a town in Tennessee. It's a pretty, it's a good city. Their average response time to 911 call is seven and a half minutes. Their drone from us gets there in 68 seconds. Just like a better quality of service. Like in the incremental cost is less than the cost of one single officer. Like it's just, it's really nice when you see technology deliver both, like a 10X better product at a dramatically lower cost.

1:03:30Garrett Langley:That's how it's supposed to work and it's working for them. Where are the drones, what kind of task or intervention are the drones best suited for? I mean, the two most, there's three primary use cases. The first would be vehicular pursuits. So one of the most dangerous things cities conduct is high-speed pursuits.

1:03:48John:Sure.

1:03:48Garrett Langley:Typically, it's not the suspect that dies. It's some random person.

1:03:51John:Restrain or something, yeah.

1:03:52Garrett Langley:So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits. They don't pursue anymore. Send the drone. Oh, wow. Just send the drone. Yeah, yeah. Way better.

1:04:03John:Yeah, yeah.

1:04:03Garrett Langley:It's way safer.

1:04:05John:So you don't have like a police car running at 80 miles an hour down a residential street.

1:04:08Garrett Langley:No, you just have a drone four feet up in the air, quietly, safely, waiting for the car to pull into a gas station, pull into their home, pull in somewhere safe, get to a red light. And then meanwhile, that video feed's being broadcasted to the entire police department. It's like, great, John's over here. Block him in.

1:04:26John:Every pursuit goes to GTA level five immediately. Yeah, if you're smart.

1:04:30Garrett Langley:So that's a big one. The second is 911 calls. So what's been interesting is that, you know, we'll send the drone first. It takes someone like Elk Grove up in North California. They've got a bunch of our drones flying the 911 calls. So where is Elk Grove? Elk Grove? It's a suburb of Sacramento. Oh, okay. But maybe 75 ,000 people. So I say suburb. It's like a pretty big town. But so like they'll dispatch for 911. Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up. and the example I'd give you is like, you see a fist fight, so you call 911, and then what happens is historically like, seven minutes later, someone shows up, guess what?

1:05:11Garrett Langley:They're no longer fighting, but now we've dispatched this officer, he's like, well, I'm in the area, maybe I'll grab a Gatorade, walk around, check it out, 30 minutes later, like we've wasted a bunch of time. You send the drone, and best case, you see the guys fighting, and you're like, great, I'm going to keep an eye on them, and like, and allow the officer to do his job, or there's never, there's not a fight anymore, you dismiss the call, and so you actually, decrease the response time for situations you really do need to go to by removing the junk in the system. So that's the second one. And the third one is search and rescues.

1:05:41Garrett Langley:Not every city has a helicopter. The cities that do is a very expensive proposition. And so sadly, people go missing all the time. And you can pop up the drone, throw on thermals, usually it's a night, and you find the person.

1:05:56John:Actually, I hadn't thought of that, but drone plus thermal camera is very transformative for SAR.

1:06:03Garrett Langley:We had an interesting case in a cold state right now. He's flying our drone. There was a... Sorry, a lot of my cases involve homicides. I've got to find a better topic than homicides at some point.

1:06:18John:I have a better topic for you in a second.

1:06:19Garrett Langley:Okay, great. So there's this 911 car on the side of the street launched the drone, thermals you can actually see where the person went

1:06:32John:like sensitive enough to see like the heat pattern like there's like there's in snow

1:06:36Garrett Langley:want to find the guy want to find himself and everything but it's just interesting like to your point I think we're still very early on in the use case exploration and I think it's the type of technology that until it's fully proliferated which give it two or three more years I think we'll continue to find more like ways to augment how we respond because I think I guess the last example I'll give you is we typically launch the drone for all first responders. It's not just law enforcement. It's fire. It's EMS. Like the whole community gets advantage of it.

1:07:03John:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My fun example, because I agree a lot of the, you know, crimes are quite heavy topics. Yeah. So I feel like one of the most satisfying genres of YouTube video to watch is people who laser aircraft, but they are mistakenly lasering a police helicopter. So this is insane crime that happens. Wait, why do they do that? Okay. So there's this insane crime that happens. Isn't that bad?

1:07:27Garrett Langley:it's like very dangerous it's very bad it's very dangerous yeah but like

1:07:30John:bored people to your point of just maybe people going mad during COVID and being cooped up people just for fun laser aircraft it's very dangerous like it's dangerous for anyone's eyes shining a laser into them but like a pilot who is flying a plane full of people at that moment it's especially bad but it's a real problem that happened you listen to like ATC recordings all the time like airliner going into LAX you know getting lasered by someone on the ground and so people buy these lasers on Amazon yeah they're like they're like very powerful lasers exactly they're very powerful and they're just lasering the cockpits of aircraft but occasionally what happens is they're lasering an aircraft, but it turns out that aircraft is the police helicopter.

1:08:02Garrett Langley:They're just like, gotcha.

1:08:03John:And they got the thermal and they're just like, and so you get to watch the whole thing unfolds. There's a bunch of these on YouTube, where you'd like to see the squad cars coming up and it's, yeah. That's odd to check that out. But it's such an odd crime. And yeah, it's very satisfying to see them caught in real time.

1:08:18Garrett Langley:Yes. That's a really weird, the other thing, because I know you like aviation stuff. we're seeing more and more police helicopters have to turn off ADS-B as well. Because criminals have the same data that you have. Yeah, yeah, sure. Most of the police helicopters actually fly without ADS-B now. Which is like a whole challenge.

1:08:37John:Sure, from a separation point of view. Okay, I have so many more things to go into or kind of jumping around, but I like this. How has the business evolved? So you're now, you said, around$500 million in ARR selling to both law enforcement agencies and corporates. Just have there been interesting changes in how you monetize? Is it just a question of scaling up? Yeah, I mean, I'd say the biggest challenge is, you know,

1:09:07Garrett Langley:two, three years ago, we were single product, single customer. Like we had our neighborhood business. It was growing 20, 30 % year over year, but it was kind of operating. And law enforcement was going really, really fast. We had one product and then maybe made a mistake. Like I know RJ from Rivian was here. Someone's like probably built too many products for too many customers really quickly. And in hardware, that's really expensive. Hardware tends to follow this J curve of like huge CapEx investment up front to get the thing going. And then you monetize and it actually winds up being -

1:09:41John:And there's very significant scale economies

1:09:42Garrett Langley:at very high orders of magnitude.

1:09:45John:Yes.

1:09:46Garrett Langley:And so, you know, we went from one camera that tracks cars to a camera that's focused for people, a drone, this trailer, multiple customer segments. And that's really hard.

1:10:00John:So looking back on it, you think you went too broad too quickly?

1:10:03Garrett Langley:Yeah. I would have better... So did you discontinue products and stuff?

1:10:07John:No, we just muscled through it.

1:10:10Garrett Langley:Still muscling through it.

1:10:11John:When you slowed down the race of adding products.

1:10:13Garrett Langley:We were like, we cannot do any new hardware products this year. Like we need to take a year or two off of hardware products. We can debate software products because there's no incremental burn or cash outlay for it. But we know what the J-curve looks like. We saw it in the core business. And the core business now is profitable, which is great. We'll generate free cash flow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cash flow this year. But those new businesses are effectively like flocked five years ago.

1:10:39John:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:10:40Garrett Langley:And we know how painful that is, but we were just like, oh, it'll be great. It'll be fine. And so I think that's been challenging for us is how do you balance from a product roadmap servicing two customers with just very different use cases? Like your average Amazon distribution facility is 30 acres, 50 acres. That's like a neighborhood block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you've got like a San Francisco that's got hundreds of square miles. It's the problems are different. And so that is probably like the hardest thing that we're still trying to muscle through that. Like, how do you organize your company to service these two different customers without having redundancies?

1:11:18John:Haven't figured that out. What have you learned? Other than don't make too many products, what have you learned by building hardware? Or what have you learned about building hardware? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that I would jump to.

1:11:34Garrett Langley:The first would be, I don't know how you guys think about forecasting demand. It's a full-time profession at Flock. Sure. and it typically needs to be 12 to 18 months out. Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the hardware companies that don't make it, that's actually where they fail.

1:11:49John:Yeah. No, we ended up with it. I mean, our hardware business is a very small part of our overall business, but we wildly overproduced at one point. And just sitting in a warehouse, like there's all my money.

1:11:59Garrett Langley:Exactly. Sitting in a warehouse. Sitting around. Now, luckily it's not, you know, it's not going to go bad. It's not like bananas. It's like, oh gosh, we have like a week to move this product. Yes. But it kind of goes bad.

1:12:08John:But it does go bad at some point.

1:12:10Garrett Langley:And I think like, you know, So I remember during YC many, many, many years ago, talking to Eric at Pebble of how it was like the irony that in the best year ever of the company in terms of revenue is the year they went out of business. They're like, that's crazy. But they just overproduced in Q4, even though it was still a record quarter, it just still wasn't enough. So I think that has been amplified by also our distribution process, which we're full first party. So we not only design the stuff, build the stuff, we install the stuff. And so I have to have forecasting. Maintain us, presumably.

1:12:48Garrett Langley:Maintain it as well. So I have to have forecasting not just at the product level, but at the geographic level, byproduct, with some level of discrepancy. I don't need to know this city versus that city, but at least the general area. So I think forecasting, that's been pretty hard. And the second is, every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of like everything's a two-way door. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door. You want to pick that part?

1:13:20John:Yeah, yeah. One-way door. We're going to live with it for the next five, 10 years.

1:13:24Garrett Langley:Yeah, and like, I don't know, you probably don't track this as much, but probably the dumbest financial mistake I've made in the last year is our supply chain team came to us like six months ago and they were like, solid state memory is getting really expensive. And like we had this one part, and those are newer cameras, and the price had gone up 4x in near time, which indicates that typically one much, much larger company placed a massive order. And so we've seen this time and time again where an Apple or a Sony or some consumer or Samsung will pick a part for a new product that's coming out in 12 months, and the supply globally disappears.

1:14:00John:Okay, so you're feeling the AI data center built out in your supply chain.

1:14:04Garrett Langley:Yes, and so our supply chain leader was like, this is getting crazy. And I was like, well, who do we use it? They're like, oh, you Sandisk. And so I'm looking at their stock, and I'm like, oh, should we be buying Sandisk? I was talking to my CFO. I was like, should we be buying Sandisk stock? I was like, their prices are going up 3x. It means that a lot of people are buying a lot of products. Now, of course, the stock's up like 1 ,200%. And I feel like an idiot for not following that conviction. But no, yeah. I mean, our bomb. Now, luckily, it's a small part of our bomb. But we have a full team of people who all they do is mitigate global supply chain risk.

1:14:34Garrett Langley:Because parts just disappear.

1:14:35John:Okay, so just getting the products into the hands of customers as already specced is non-trivial.

1:14:41Garrett Langley:So what we wind up doing, which I think a lot of companies do, I'm not sure if we're special, but it's just like you don't think about this, is when we look at a bomb of a product, we'll risk purchase, not necessarily the whole thing, but the cheapest, highest risk things. We should have bought, and we did, we bought a ton of memory so that we didn't run out because we can't.

1:14:59John:But I would have thought, you know, often these supply chain crunches come on the leading edge where, you know, everyone's fighting over TSMC, you know, three nanometer node production capability. But, you know, the auto chips, you know, much larger gate sizes are not or larger nodes are not as contended. And I would have thought that you guys are not using tippity-top-end cameras and lenses and memories and things like that. But that's not a panacea? It's like capacitors.

1:15:34Garrett Langley:And the point I give you is, let's say we ship 100 ,000 units. That's tiny. And so all it takes is, if we need this capacitor from Texas Instruments, all it takes is Apple saying, well, the iPhone 27 is going to have that capacitor. and Apple's like, cool, we'll buy everything for the next three years. And then we go, oh crap, we've got to completely change that capacitor. But I'm just surprised you're competing

1:15:59John:with Apple for components. Like I would have thought their capacitors and your capacitors.

1:16:03Garrett Langley:I mean, well, capacitor is a capacitor, but so to actually know the capacitor you want, you have to have a supply chain to buy it. You have to have enough inventory with enough leave time.

1:16:12John:Like it is not,

1:16:13Garrett Langley:and so what you wind up doing is like early on, your designs are very simple. You buy everything from, you know, out of fruit or whatever. You buy everything like from easy places where you can buy 50 at a time. And when you move to like tens of thousands at a time, you start having to have designs that have four different derivatives for every part so that your supply chain doesn't have to call engineering being like, this part's out. They know like these parts are all sub-ins.

1:16:35John:You're describing the scale disconomies of manufacturing where it's easier to buy three of something than it is to buy 30 ,000 of them. 100%.

1:16:41Garrett Langley:And I never would have thought we would need like a team of people who all they do is spend money for a living,

1:16:46John:which buy stuff. What's hard about operating the hardware? Like how do you keep the lenses clean on the cameras? and just how do you, I don't know.

1:16:53Garrett Langley:It's like on the one hand, we're some of the best weather forecasters. It's like we keep track of every major storm. It's like storm, like we need to be back up. So we do, like we have a pretty cool, we call it our flight team and there are technicians that only fly. It's like that big storm in New York and Boston, like they were flying in to the storm. Like we had surge demand to fix stuff.

1:17:17John:To be on site to when they get a call that something is down, go repair it.

1:17:22Garrett Langley:Yeah. So everything's, we have really good telemetry on the equipment. So if a customer calls, something's gone. Yeah. Like we've really screwed up. Yeah, you know before the customer knows. We know before the customer knows. And most of the maintenance at this point is fairly predictive. Like we know this mechanical part malfunctions after between 100 ,000 and 200 ,000 uses. So like if you're in the area, it's ironic that the largest cost structure in replacing equipment is the driving.

1:17:46John:Yeah, yeah. It's driving.

1:17:47Garrett Langley:And so if we think the part needs a replacement in six months, and we're nearby, it's cheaper just to replace it, refurb it, and get it back in the field. So that part's been like, we had to build a software company, a hardware company, and a field services business. Do you have parts that wear out? I would have thought the whole thing is fairly solid state. Most of it's, well, drones obviously fly. Sure, different kettle of fish. But on the camera side, there's one part, which is the IR cut filter. So when we operate at night, we operate on infrared and you need a different filter so that you don't have pink images during the day.

1:18:22Garrett Langley:So that literally changes twice a day.

1:18:25John:Oh, like something mechanically... Put a lens over it. I see. And after a couple of thousand uses... That is the one moving part. And it is the only part that breaks. How much does it have two lenses?

1:18:38Garrett Langley:With two different image sensors too? Yeah. Bomb. Okay. No good, like no good reason. Okay. Other than it would just be more expensive. But yeah, that part's like, I think a third of the company, like I said, digs holes, drives bucket trucks. Yeah, sure. Keeps track of all the kind of inventory. But if you look at it, you know, I didn't want to build that business. Yes. But early on in the company, there was this horrific case in Atlanta where a woman was just running and, you know, our version of like Mission Dolores or pick your like nice park in the city. Random act of violence. There's cameras everywhere in the park.

1:19:15Garrett Langley:Yep. None of them are working. And the city got blasted appropriately for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're like, well, but also, like, do we really want our police department being in charge of, like, camera uptime? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, like, that's a dumb idea. Yeah. We should, like, pay a company, i.e. Flock in this case, to just, like, make sure the stuff always works.

1:19:31John:Yes.

1:19:32Garrett Langley:So it's not the, you know, my favorite part of the business in that sense of, like, it's just, it's a lot of stress. It's very operationally intense, but I think it's valuable to our customers.

1:19:40John:Yeah.

1:19:40Garrett Langley:Yeah.

1:19:41John:How do you think about the right, you talk about cameras in the park, you know, many movies center on this idea of universal surveillance, you know, in the Bourne identity or something, you know, they have cameras on absolutely everything. everything or I guess the point supremacy I think is more the um the waterloo station scene and um same with lots of other things just how do you create the right guardrails once you move off roads and into parks and public spaces and kind of creating access controls around that yeah um

1:20:14Garrett Langley:the cop-out answer is like I don't want to be in charge of deciding that thankfully we have elected officials who we vote to make that decision but what do you think a sensible place for them to land us? I think it's way higher than we have now. Like, I think that, for me at least, for every crime that occurs that doesn't get solved means we didn't have enough cameras. That's, to me, the easiest rubric. Now, I think to your question, though, it's a question of where they are,

1:20:47John:who has access to them.

1:20:49Garrett Langley:And I think it's one of the few cases where, where the disparity between maybe my knowledge and your knowledge of how the technology works and how much official works, it's pretty big. And their dreams of how it might work versus actually how it works, it's much less sophisticated than they think or dream up. It's just a camera. So for me, at least, we should have an abundance of cameras and have an incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used. And the example I'd give you is like today, everything in Flock you can generally do. There's data retention where we protect how long something is stored.

1:21:26Garrett Langley:So for live video it's typically seven days. For LPR data it's typically 30 days. You can go longer or shorter if a democratically elected body boats on it. But I would challenge why not do more cameras and have a warrant restriction? Why not do 30 days of LPR data but if you have a warrant you have a year. You need less cameras. So I do think there are some nuanced ways to do it. And thankfully, we have a really good government affairs team that is lobbying for that kind of legislation to say, there's a way for us to both be safe and maintain civil liberties. And it needs to be legislated though.

1:22:04Garrett Langley:I can't, those ideas are not in line with what my customers want. And my law enforcement customers, they just want to go catch bad guys. They want to follow the constitution, catch bad guys. But that nuance in the middle of like, but what is societally acceptable today really belongs in your elected officials to make that decision so it can change. And so we push them to be like, let's legislate this now before it becomes a problem. Where do you think has passed sensible rules? Sensible. I think Virginia's bill last year was pretty good. It defined, it did a few things well. And one thing I don't agree with.

1:22:47Garrett Langley:What it did well is it defined a modest data retention period of 21 days. I think that's fine. I like 30, but tomato, tomato, it's fine. It wasn't, I think the ACLU was lobbying for three minutes. It's a little tough. It's hard to swallow. I think, you know, 7, 14, 20-something days is like enough. There's a trade-off there. They mandated formal auditing, which I think is great. Not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. we can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It was like customers don't want it. They need to be told to do it. So I think that was good.

1:23:24Garrett Langley:It also validated that this could only be used for criminal investigations, which I think is really good. While that's obvious, it's helpful to write it in law. I think the only thing that I disagree with is they did say, you know, effectively, there's no participation with the federal government. I think that's just, it's their choice. I think it's their choice. And that's the beauty of the country is like Virginia should do what feels right for Virginia. But I worry about the types of cases that you don't want to read about on the news that tend to get solved by the U.S. Marshals, the DEA, the ATF, the FBI.

1:24:00Garrett Langley:And like they can't use our technology in Virginia, which is, like I said, I live in Georgia. So thankfully it doesn't really impact me. But as a business, I'm like, I don't know if that's right. But I'm more than anything just happy they passed some legislation. New Mexico passed a similar bill this year. California has a similar-ish bill. I think a couple other states have. I think the worst type of bill is actually not, whether it's 14 days or 30 days of detention. To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill. So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for possession of marijuana.

1:24:42John:I'm like, who's going to enforce it?

1:24:44Garrett Langley:And it's like, you might believe that. And that's great. But someone has to enforce this. And actually what's going to happen is no one's going to enforce it now. And that's, I think, like really bad law in those cases. Yeah. That makes sense. I'm curious what your view is on police department procurement.

1:25:02John:What do they do? What do they buy not enough of? What do they buy too much of? They don't feel like they're swimming in, you know, procurement dollars.

1:25:14Garrett Langley:but yeah i'm curious yeah i mean the thing they buy too much of is and not to pick on motorola things that only matter in the 0.001 case so it's like guys why don't you just use like cell phones like well in a natural disaster and it's like got it okay like how often like so you look at like a landmass radio contract and it's in a costume like san francisco county you know 200

1:25:41John:million dollars like i mean like it's like that kind of money on a on a tcv basis oh yeah wow i

1:25:48Garrett Langley:mean i mean i think uh murray's a really good company sure yeah that's how yeah he says you don't get there uh and you go well i get it like if there's an earthquake and every single cell tower goes down law enforcement definitely needs a way to communicate man is that really the only way yeah like well could you guys just like have your own tower there's gotta be something but you

1:26:11John:look into it is this a your margin is my opportunity situation for you guys maybe because

1:26:16Garrett Langley:law enforcement's unique in this case in which like they really also like that they own the infrastructure like they own that bandwidth and so they can do whatever they want with it yeah i don't think they do anything interesting with it but they can yeah versus if they're riding on on verizon or at &t they have no control over why don't you guys just have the exact same products like radio in the spectrum. We probably should. But we got a lot of things. That's my, you know, like a VC and a board. Yeah, it's like, hey, you guys should do this. You should go to an$80 billion company that's been in business for 130 years.

1:26:45Garrett Langley:Like, I mean, I guess you did it in payments and it worked out pretty well. But yeah, so I think like that part I think is really, really kind of crazy. At least like in the business world, I feel like I buy for my majority case. Yes, yes. And I deal with the ramifications of the edge case or build around it and they do that. I think procurement is exceptionally slow and exceptionally laborious everything goes to rfp yeah but the rfp is written for one vendor so all it does is winding wind up taking an extra year yeah six months that's like that's i get why rfps exist yeah but they're not actually rfps i've never seen an rfp that's not written for one vendor um i'm sure it exists somewhere yeah i haven't seen it i haven't seen it um but what i think they do well is like one of the things that i think uh the government did to figure out is maybe you need to have an RFP for a$200 million contract.

1:27:35What about

1:27:35Garrett Langley:a$10 ,000 contract? Great. So they do have spin levels where, you know, if you're like a police chief, you can go spend$25 ,000 or$50 ,000 and like not have to go through the entire process. But no, it's tough. Like it's, I would not wish upon anyone selling to local government. It's more negatives than positives in a lot of ways.

1:27:54John:Yeah. And again, that's procurement process has evolved for a reason, you know, and to protect against certain other failure modes. But yeah, it creates a certain...

1:28:01Garrett Langley:Well, I mean, you think about it in business, and like, I know you. We use Stripe. I'm sure you have like six competitors. I don't know. But like, I know you. Some of you shouldn't buy Stripe. That in the business world is considered very normal. Yeah. In the government world, that is called illegal. Yeah. Which is really, it's really interesting.

1:28:21John:Yeah.

1:28:21Garrett Langley:But again, it's evolved for a reason.

1:28:23John:The rules are written in blood.

1:28:24Garrett Langley:Well, no. And then like, you have plenty of cases where it's, you know, it's gone sideways. but it is just interesting to not name it for so many things that we take for granted as normal business practice are definitively illegal when procuring with government.

1:28:36John:How do you guys use Stripe?

1:28:38Garrett Langley:I mean, a lot of our customers, a lot of our private sector customers pay either via credit card or check. Ah, okay. With a lot of checks.

1:28:45John:Okay, so for the public sector stuff that'll generally be via a torturous, you know, RFP process and PO and something like that but for your private sector. And then, but even, I mean, we don't want to be in the check deposit business. Sure. You guys. So you strike for the check functionality because no one knows about our check functionality that Stripe can accept checks for you. Am I allowed to talk about it? No, no one knows because we're bad at marketing. Oh, I was just like, oh. Not because it's a secret.

1:29:13Garrett Langley:No, yeah, no. It's like, we don't want to be in that business. Yes. It's a remote deposit box, whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's great.

1:29:19John:We can give you an address that you can give to your customers and they can mail checks to it and we will turn it into digital money. And the fact that a bunch of atoms and, you know, an envelope going through the postal system. We're involved. You can be, you can forget about those details.

1:29:33Garrett Langley:Not a single customer of ours pays via ACH to either check or credit card. And we do a lot of checks. I'd probably say 80%, 90 % of checks, maybe higher.

1:29:41John:You're one of the few tech companies to mostly use Stripe for checks.

1:29:45Garrett Langley:It's, you know, trying to buck the trend every day of the week.

1:29:49John:That's really funny. I love that. You were talking about police departments maybe being over-fixated on kind of the 0.1 % cases, does that apply to a common critique that you hear of police department procurement is the sort of militarization of police departments and what we really need is a bear cast for this town of 20 ,000 people, which is like an armored personnel carrier. Oh, yeah, and it's like a$3 million vehicle

1:30:16Garrett Langley:when it's like, why couldn't we just get an F-150?

1:30:18John:So do you think that applies also to kind of the shiny stuff? Oh, yeah.

1:30:21Garrett Langley:I mean, you look at early on when we were building the company, we'd get the question of like, can your license plate reader work on a car going 175 miles an hour? And I was like, probably not. I've never driven that fast. I'd have to rent a runway to go test this. They're like, it's really important. I'm like, really? How often does it happen? They're like, in a high-speed pursuit, people drive very fast. And I'm like, in high-speed pursuit, you know who they are. We were criticized and had to build a product. Until we got to like 120, 150, it was a major blocker to sales. Really? Huh. I mean, it's like we built a camera that, I mean, we tested it on roads that we drove on.

1:31:03Garrett Langley:So we'd get up to like 80 or 90 and it worked fine. But we had to eventually, we rented an amateur racing track and just drove around in circles at 120 miles. We emailed the employees and we're like, who owns a car that goes really fast? And that was actually kind of funny because a lot of people were like -

1:31:18John:That's what what cars do you use to test this?

1:31:19Garrett Langley:So we had these, like, there's some fast cars. Plenty of Teslas, Rivians, some other nicer cars. Yep. They drive really fast. And, like, that was, like, a fun day. Because I put the cameras up and, like, do it. And did the cameras work out of the box?

1:31:32John:Or did you have to tune the model performance? Yeah, okay, so it just worked.

1:31:35Garrett Langley:They're the only place where we've had to make one modification, which is kind of interesting. We deploy our radar. So on really busy roads, where our angle of incident is particularly tight, I, like, we can't shoot super far down. We have to shoot at a sharp angle. We have a radar attachment. that we tilt backwards to notify the cars on the way, like get ready, which helps.

1:31:56John:But that's like a very far edge case.

1:31:59Garrett Langley:Because the camera doesn't actually...

1:32:00John:You prime the camera essentially? Yes, to get ready for a car coming.

1:32:03Garrett Langley:Huh, I'm sorry. Because the camera is offline. Oh. Unless there's a vehicle.

1:32:09John:I see, so you boot it up. And that's a power saving measure?

1:32:13Garrett Langley:Yeah, the most expensive thing we do is take a picture. The second most expensive thing we do is send stuff to the cloud. Third is just like being a computer turned on. And so it's similar to your iPhone, you know, turning your screen off. Okay. So we added the button, you know, to take a photo right away.

1:32:29John:The continuously running radar is very low power?

1:32:33Garrett Langley:It's negligible.

1:32:34John:I see.

1:32:35Garrett Langley:Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that was a fun one.

1:32:36John:We were talking about hardware previously, but what's building your own drones been like?

1:32:42Garrett Langley:A lot of fun. Sounds fun. No, it's fun, but it's like, Like, you know, I have kids, I know you have a kid. It's like really fun to build a product that your kids understand. It's like we drive around Atlanta and my son will count the cameras from like home to school, you know, or we're going to like the airport or we'll go like to the park. And like, I love that he can actually like understand what dad does. Yes. I'm not sure if you've taught your son like how to use a console. I'm screwed on this access. Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, I got, yeah. Yeah, we process the world's payments. And so when you show him a drone, he's like, oh, this is so cool.

1:33:22Garrett Langley:He has like a little miniature drone.

1:33:23John:Well, also, you not only do drones, but you do drones to catch bad guys. Yeah, yeah. It's like very compelling. From a very early age.

1:33:29Garrett Langley:Yeah, to be clear, you'll watch Paw Patrol and be like, that's what dad builds. Like, that's the helicopter. We don't put any people in it. But I think what's been fun is we made a hypothesis that if you studied planes, I think the most interesting plane, military-wise, is the Warthog. Whereas traditionally, you built a plane. One thing. Yeah, like, what kind of missiles can we add? And they were like, no, no, let's design the best missile. It's very precise, very big. And then we'll figure out how to fly it. And so our thesis was, well, we're really good at cameras. A drone is really just a camera that flies.

1:34:05Garrett Langley:let's build the best payload and then figure out how to fly it. And so like if I showed you, I could show you the payload the next time you're in Atlanta or we could fly one out here. It's like the coolest camera ever. It's huge. It's like this big. And it's got four different, I think it's four different image sensors, maybe six different optical lenses. Like we can zoom, we can read a license plate almost a mile away. Like crazy specs, great thermal. Then we're quick to get it to fly. So like, I don't know, I was an electrical engineer. One of my co-founders was a mechanical engineer. it's fun to build things that fly.

1:34:37Garrett Langley:So it's like, all right, we have a payload, we have this airframes, we have aeronautical engineers now. Like it's been fun to grow the engineering team. An imaging team, you think about the dock that it lives in, it's effectively a commercial grade HVAC system. Like the drone lands, it needs to be cold, it needs to be hot, it has to charge. If you know anything about lithium ion, lithium ion doesn't like to be too hot or too cold. So you got to keep that well conditioned. It's like this huge compressor. It's this massive thing that opens and closes. And if it's snowing, if it's frozen, like all of these engineering problems.

1:35:03Garrett Langley:Yes. And that's the fun part of this stuff. Everything else is, you know, selling is good, but building stuff is fun.

1:35:11John:How many drones do you have out there in the world?

1:35:12Garrett Langley:Oh, we don't discuss that one.

1:35:14John:But decent number.

1:35:15Garrett Langley:Yeah, no, it's hundreds of cities that are flying. Are flying drones.

1:35:20John:It's funny, when you talk about the A-10 Warthog, you're reminding me of the Boyd book by Robert Coram, which I only read recently, but it's like one of those kind of Silicon Valley canon. And everyone talks about him in the context of his OODA loop, you know, orient, something, decide, act. But that's actually kind of overrated. And actually, the main reason Boyd is interesting is helping the Pentagon procure better planes. I'm just reminded of that with the Warthog and also, you know, your description of needing to run at 170 miles an hour. Because basically, he came into a Pentagon that had a bunch of bad planes because all the generals were just obsessed with specs.

1:36:02John:Yes. And they wanted, you know, a high top speed. And like, they really judged planes on specs. And actually, you know, the fighter pilot joke is that there are only two throttle settings in a dogfight. You know, maximum full military power or throttles idle. Like, those are the only two energy states that you're in. And what matters is maneuverability and the ability to add energy or lose energy quickly. So anyway, he was involved in basically all of the good planes that were produced. including the A-10 Warthog because he got them out of the mindset of just kind of speeds and feeds.

1:36:34Garrett Langley:Well, and that's like for us, the spec we track is like time on scene.

1:36:37John:Yeah.

1:36:38Garrett Langley:And so one of the reasons why we care so much about the payload is like if you have a payload that can see really far away, you don't have to fly there. So actually you get there faster virtually. Yep, yep. Which is what like, if this was a drone that was carrying a payload like a zipline or something else, like actually physically in there matters. But for us, it's just about time on virtual scene. Yes. So that's what we measure ourselves to. So that's why we fly high, because physics allows you to see farther. That's why we have this huge payload, so you don't have to actually fly there. And then you don't have to fly as fast, which means you can conserve battery life, which means you're in the air longer.

1:37:07Garrett Langley:All of these designs were around that use case versus, I'm sure ZipLine went through a whole separate use case of what's the max payload and all that kind of stuff.

1:37:16John:How many drones does a city the size of San Francisco need?

1:37:20Garrett Langley:Twelve.

1:37:21John:Okay, so a very small number.

1:37:22Garrett Langley:No, our average drone can cover a 30 square mile radius and get there within under a minute. and thankfully you know knock on wood like there actually aren't that many 911 calls that merit of response so we look at it both ways we look at it in terms of geography and then 911 density so in you know more rural parts you need less drones because there's less call for service and then in more dense urban areas you need more drones mostly from a volume of service but even in our most dense customers like it's pretty rare that they fly two drones at once it happens but it's like I think our busiest drone is being flown, you know, 90 hours a week.

1:38:01Garrett Langley:That's a lot of flight time.

1:38:02John:And sorry, do you dispatch the drone when it's needed from its charging dock? Or is the idea that it's out there flying already and you just task it?

1:38:08Garrett Langley:Yeah, there's like, it lives in the dock. There is some, there's debate of whether a drone should be in the air at all times.

1:38:16John:Does that actually save you meaningful time?

1:38:19Garrett Langley:Being in the air? Yeah. I would save a lot of time.

1:38:21John:Oh, really?

1:38:22Garrett Langley:Yeah, but like you look at the Carpenter case in Baltimore, and they had a airplane with a very powerful camera 24 hours a day. And that was deemed like a unwarranted search. And so it got killed. And so we're very conscious. Like we have a other part of our business that is interesting now at scale. It's like we have a full team of constitutional attorneys. And I'm sure you have like a regulatory team that when you want to build something, they're like, let's check it before we ship. Yes. We have a constitutional team. It's like, cool idea. Let's actually make sure this doesn't violate the constitution.

1:38:54John:Let's just look up the Fourth Amendment here real quick. Yeah, let's just double-check this thing.

1:38:58Garrett Langley:And so when you look at the drone, we believe, and this hasn't been tested in court, but these are smart people, they're like, look, it's unclear how that would end in court. But if you call 911, there is a reason to fly the drone. If there is a gunshot, if there is a gunshot detection, if there is a stolen car, that is a reason to dispatch versus just flying around looking for stuff. is not unconstitutional, but we would not push that as a use case.

1:39:24John:Sorry, like a lot of this precedent, you know, as new technologies come along, you know, people reason by analogy of like, you know, cars, somewhat like your house, but somewhat different, you know, whatever. Like, isn't a drone flying around just like a police cruiser on its patrol?

1:39:41Garrett Langley:So the, and I'm not an attorney.

1:39:45John:Neither am I. Never stopped me yet.

1:39:46Garrett Langley:The other analogy that would be the butterfly effect, which is like when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, historical precedent gets thrown away. And so you take the helicopter example. You could say, oh, well, helicopters fly sometimes. I'm like, yeah, but helicopters are so expensive. It's not practical to have 24-7 aerial coverage. With a drone, it's not impractical. It's the same reason why when we launch our drone, we want to go from the launch location to the end location. The cameras point at the horizon the whole time. We don't want to look in your backyard. um that's like i feel really strong and that's not a law that's just like our point of view of where the law should be yes so we'll build a product for that and then look if the operator wants to tilt down that's their control but as a default we're fine straight very interesting

1:40:32John:last question you know so you guys have grown with cameras out there uh in cities now getting into drones uh building the software os to help law enforcement agencies and others kind of synthesize all the information they have. Just what comes next? What future product ideas are you playing with? We're doing it now.

1:40:51Garrett Langley:So I think about it. We talked about this earlier. Failure for flock is prison population goes up. It's actually like really bad. And we look at, you know, the products today are very much focused in the middle of a crime. A crime has already happened and therefore we should solve it. And that's really good. And I think we're definitely not done, but we've done a lot of work in that category. I get pretty interested in expanding that and going, well, what can we be doing from a product perspective to prevent crime from happening? And that actually doesn't necessarily look like software. It's like one of the interesting things that we started last year.

1:41:30Garrett Langley:So we call our Thriving Cities Fund. It's probably an analogy similar to your Stripe Press, which is like it's never going to be the core of your business, but you feel really good that it's a part of your business. And so when we go in places like Greenville, Mississippi, we also commit to deploy capital as growth partners to those businesses. Because if we want to convince that 16-year-old to not be a criminal, there does need to be jobs. Jobs that like a 16-year-old can get. And so we deploy capital in, you know, restaurants, nail salons, like pick your business that you can be 16 and work out easily.

1:42:03Garrett Langley:And like, we want more of those to exist. You know, last year, I think we were at, you know, 21 % IRR. So like, it's not a bad business. It's not, I think Fox Stock's done a lot better than 21%, but like, I feel really strongly we could deploy hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of capital in the cities that also choose to be safe. I don't want to go deploy capital in a place that doesn't want to be safe. So I'm like, I want to do more there. And then I think to our conversation on the other half, you know, the majority of the crime we solve is not violent. It's nonviolent. And today the discrepancy for a juvenile, non-juvenile, you still wind up in some type of penitentiary or prison system?

1:42:44Garrett Langley:I think that's crazy. Like all the data shows as soon as you wind up in prison, you're going to get violent and you're going to come back. And so I would articulate there as an opportunity, don't know yet what it is, to say, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. If this was an opportunistic criminal, is there a product with a capital P, because that might not be software, it might be hardware or software, I don't know, that allows that person to have a second chance. And in a way that is not going to increase their likelihood of doing it again, like that's bad. But like prison can't be the answer. Like it just doesn't work.

1:43:23Garrett Langley:And the whole concept of prison will never work. Like, and there are some incredibly well-run prisons with really well-intentioned wardens doing the best of their ability, but the concept of putting a bunch of violent people together is like by default flawed. And so I question, like, what could Flock be doing to say, I'm going to prevent kids from becoming criminals. And if you do wind up on that path, how do I get you back on track as fast as possible? And we're a for-profit business, so I'm not looking to be a nonprofit. But I think there is something there. I mean, talking about millions and millions of people who really need, like, it's actually as a society in our best interest to get them back in and productive.

1:44:02Garrett Langley:And I want to do both of those.

1:44:03John:So fewer crimes, fewer people in prisons. Yeah.

1:44:06Garrett Langley:That's the end goal.

1:44:07John:Thank you. Thank you.

1:44:08Garrett Langley:It was fun. It was awesome. Yeah.